All Ages: The Limit Does Not Exist
I grew up in New Jersey — a state with undeniable musical history. Beyond Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi, this oft-insulted landmass has acted as a cross-generational beacon of punk and hardcore glory. Perhaps it’s our shitty reputation of oil tankers, strip malls, and fist pumping. Maybe it’s the less-talked-about countrysides, farmlands, and oceanfronts. But something about this place makes it rife with songwriting opportunities aligned with values and themes typically celebrated within this music scene — loving your town, hating your town, loving your friends, hating your friends, having your heart broken, going to diners. That’s what resonated with me and what resonates with many misguided suburban teenagers.
Right now, I sit in a coffee shop in New Brunswick — a small college town from where pioneers and torch-bearers hailed — Lifetime, Thursday, Bouncing Souls, You and I, Midtown, The Gaslight Anthem, Screaming Females. Travel up US–1 and you’ll run into Newark, hometown of My Chemical Romance. Down US–1 South, you’ll hit Princeton, the hometown of my favorite band — Saves The Day. Even now, nearly 30 years old, I drive around here with giddiness as the history of the bands and scene I love surround me. Being a teenager here in the 2000s was really exciting, and it made being a music fan easy, fun, romantic, accessible.
It also made growing up and out of it harder. And I can’t say I have, will, or even want to.
I will be 30 in October — a senior citizen by Zack’s standards, and approximately eight years beyond the age where recent college graduates tout that they’re “too old” – for shows, for “the pit,” for staying out late. Punk, emo, or whatever restrictive adjectives you want to assign to my taste have steered my life’s course since I was 13. My hobbies, my friendships, my passions, my (failed) relationships, my humor, my place of residence — direct results of picking up blink–182 and MxPx records sometime in the late 90s and never really putting them down.
Honestly, I’ve been struggling with the inevitability of the first digit of my age odometer flipping from two to three. I’m worried about people I consider(ed?) peers ostracizing me for being “too old.” I’m worried about retreating because I assume people will feel that way. I’m worried that “normal” adults, whatever that means, will snicker and tell me to get a “real hobby.” I’m worried that I’ll look back when I’m 35 and wonder why the fuck I spent 20 years doing whatever this is. I’m often confronted with the tension caused by feeling like I should be feeling nostalgic and the reality that nostalgia requires one to detach his/herself from present-day enjoyment.
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